Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The statue had been unveiled but a few days when the city spoke of it, and spoke of little else, wherever art was comprehended and talked of: it took a tired public by surprise, and its triumph was instantaneous and widespread.

  There was something in it that was unlike all the world had ever seen: the very mystery that to many enveloped its meaning only added to its charm for the curiosity of mankind. Within a few weeks her name was a household word in the world of art, — that short and happy-sounding name that was in such sad unlikeness to her destiny. She had been the original of the Nausicaa, some sculptor told them so; and then they flocked to where the Nausicaa could be seen, and talked the more of her, and some few began to say, “That is the same face as the Roman girl who was with Hilarion.”

  For though the world has a shallow memory for excellence, it is always tenacious of remembrances that are hurtful, and of recollections that can tarnish renown.

  One day Hilarion arrived in Paris, having been absent for a month or so. He loved all the arts, nor ever missed the fresh fruits of them: he went early to the Salon one bright morning with some associates, who were famous men in their own way, and artists. One of them, midway in the central chamber, touched him and pointed to the Roman marble.

  “Look! That is the marvel of all Paris. A perfect creation; and they say the sculptor is only a woman.”

  Hilarion listlessly lifted his eyes to the figure: then his face lost all color, and he approached it quickly.

  “Now I see you beside it, it is like you,” said one of his friends. “Perhaps you have known her in Rome? She is a Roman, and was a pupil of Maryx, they say.”

  Hilarion was silent. He was very pale. He understood the parable in the stone.

  His friends spoke learnedly around him, praising the work with the discriminative homage of great critics. On the base of the statue her name was cut, after the habit of sculptors: he read it, and it hurt him curiously.

  He stood before the figure, that was but himself made god, and heeded nothing of the jests of his friends. As the sun shone all about the fair pale Carrara marble, and illumined the name cut on the stone, he felt a pang that had never before touched his cold, voluptuous self-control and fortunate life.

  “Who else could love me like that?” he thought to himself; and thought also, “What beasts we are, that it is not love that touches us, but the pursuit of it that we desire!”

  He understood that to him alone was consecrated her creation. She had striven to excel only that by excelling she might reach some place in his remembrance. The bird was dead: he repented that he had killed it.

  A little later, a woman who could say to him what men could not venture to say, spoke to him of it.

  “This poet is you,” she said. “Who loves you like that? Was the poor bird that lies dead a mere woman, like Aedon and Philomel?”

  He answered, “Yes, but a woman without sin; the sin was mine.”

  And his conscience stirred in him, and his heart went out to her, and he remembered her as he had seen her when he had kissed her first, and trembling she had cried to him, “It will be all my life!”

  It was all her life: it had been only a summer or two of his.

  The statue he would have bought if any extravagance — if half his fortune — could have purchased it; but it was in no way to be had.

  In early morning, long before the men and women of his own world were astir, he rose often and went into the lonely place where the figure stood, and looked at it.

  “No one else could love me like that,” he thought over and over again to himself.

  She had accepted her fate at his hands without reproach and without appeal; but this message sent to him in the marble, this parable in stone, moved him as no words and as no woe would have done. The faint hope with which she had sent it forth was fulfilled. He remembered; almost he repented.

  He read the parable of the marble, but he stayed on with the apes and the asps, and the one mocked and beguiled him, and the others bit his tired senses into a poisonous irritation which he fancied was passion. But still when he was in solitude he remembered, he regretted, almost he repented.

  Meanwhile, about him the great world talked of her wherever the arts were understood by men, and saluted her as a great artist. The laurel was set like a sharp spear in her breast, and was watered with her heart’s blood, as with Daphne’s.

  Hearing that, he strove to silence his conscience, saying to himself, “Her genius is with her: it will console her in time. I have not harmed her, — so much.”

  One night, on an impulse, he wrote to her, and sent it through me. They were but seven words:

  “I am unworthy, but I thank you.”

  I gave them to her. She wept over them and blessed them as other women weep over and bless the face of their firstborn. She was thankful as other women are before some great gift of homage and of honor rendered to them in the sight of nations.

  To me the words seemed but poor and cold.

  I could not tell then how he felt when he wrote them. I heard from him long afterwards, when all was of no use.

  They did contain, indeed, perhaps the truest utterance that he had ever made. He felt his own unworthiness, he who had been wrapped all his days in the toga of a superb and indifferent and contemptuous vanity, and the sense of it wounded and galled him; yet he thanked her because he had a heart in his breast, and because, as he said, men are not vile, they are only children, — children spoiled often by the world’s indulgence or by the world’s injustice.

  He would go, I say, in the early morning, when none of his own world were about, and stand before the statue, and think of her, till a great shame entered into him, and a great regret.

  An angel comes once in their lives to most men: seldom do they know their visitant; often do they thrust the door against it. Anyway, it never comes but once. He recognized the angel now; nay, he had known it when first he had opened his arms to it; but it had brought too pure a breath of heaven with it: he had put it away and gone back to the apes and the asps; and the marble looked at him, and its parable smote him into remembrance and regret.

  But he did not return; for he had not loved her.

  Besides, he did not dare to take to this creature who still loved him, and who dwelt under the shield of Athene, merely more shame again. He did not dare to look in those clear eyes which saw the faces of the immortals, and say, “I never loved you; I only ruined your life out of a vain caprice.”

  She, wearing out her years in silence and solitude for his sake in that loneliness which is more bitter and sorrowful than any widowhood, would not have touched him; but she, with the clue and the sword in her hands and the laurel in her breast, regained a place in his remembrance, and haunted him.

  The dead he would have forgotten; but this living woman, of whom the world spoke, whom it crowned, who had the supreme powers of art, and threw them down at his feet and dedicated them to him alone, this living woman he could not forget, and he said again and again to himself, “Who else could love me like that?”

  There are men whom the entire consciousness of the perfect possession of a woman’s life makes indifferent: there is no need to guard what will not stray. Such men need the spur of uncertainty, the stimulant of rivalry; this is why innocent women fail and vile women succeed. Hilarion was one of these men: the absolute consecration of her, body and soul, to himself did not cement but only loosened the bonds that bound him.

  “She will always be there,” he had said to himself. So he had left her, and had strayed to those of whom he was not so sure.

  The faint unformed jealousy which now rose in him of Maryx drew his thoughts back to her as no sense of her living and dying for his sake could ever have done. He could not tell that Maryx never even saw her face. He could not know that she had refused to see her master, and that Maryx of his own will shrank from any approach to her.

  He heard that Maryx had placed her talent before the world, and heard all men speak the name o
f her teacher in company with hers. A vague irritation, which was not worthy of a better name, stirred in him: he knew they were both in Rome.

  It was his perception of the love of Maryx for her which had first made him subjugate her to his own passion. The affinity of Maryx to her in this their common art stirred in him a restless annoyance, which only was not jealousy because he knew her too well and because he loved her too little.

  He knew that she to himself would be forever faithful; but, though he knew this, he did not like to think that any other lived who could render her that loyalty, that tenderness, that service in which his own passion had been lacking,. He knew well that she would live and die alone; but he did not care to think that a greater than himself could call to her consolation in her solitude the gifts and the arms of Athene.

  He knew himself to be very base in this; but when the world speaking of her said, She was the pupil of Maryx,” he felt a contemptuous impatience; when they said, “She was a mistress of Hilarion,” he was content. He knew that this was very base, so base that seeing it in any other man he would have called it the dishonor of a knave. Yet so it was.

  And still there were times when, standing before the marble in the pure morning light, he thought with many a pang of that young life which had been as pure as the light of day ere he had clouded it; and his conscience smote him sorely, because by his act, and by his will, forever there would lie across the lustre of her fame the heavy shadow of the world’s reproach.

  “You grow dull,” said the apes and the asps to him; and he made them no answer: he had always forgotten all things so easily, and now — for once — he could not forget.

  Meanwhile Maryx was also in Paris.

  He had not yielded to any other the care of her labor, nor let any chance escape him of being first to do her service. When he heard and read, as he did, that her work was declared greater than his own (for the world is very mutable and false to its own idols), he was glad, — for her sake. He knew that it was not so, but the strong alone can be generous.

  He was thankful that by any means of his, Art could console her, — the divine Dionysos, who came to her in her loneliness on Naxos, amidst the salt sea, and who might perchance make the barren rock bloom with flowers for her once more.

  When the fame of the statue was certain, and all Paris, and thus all the world, spoke of it, he returned to us.

  “Will she see me — now?” he asked me.

  I answered him, yes.

  The day had been chill; it was evening-time; lamps that swung from cords shed a faint light in her studio as he entered; she rose and went to him. I saw him shiver and move a step backward involuntarily: then he controlled himself.

  “I have done what I could,” he said; and then his voice was choked in his throat.

  She looked up into his eyes.

  “You will not hurt him?”

  “No.”

  Then she took his hands in hers.

  “You are my master and my friend: I thank you.”

  He shivered again at her touch; but the brave soul in him kept silence.

  “Dear, you are my pupil no more,” he said, with a smile, — ah! the courage of that smile! “You are greater than I; the world says so.”

  “The world is foolish,” she answered. “If I be great in any way, it is by you alone.”

  “Nay, — by Athene!” he said, and strove to smile again.

  He left her very soon.

  To remain near her was beyond his strength. We went together down the dusky stairs and out into the night.

  We went on in silence through the city towards the river’s banks.

  “She looks ill,” he said, abruptly, once.

  “Oh, no! oh, no!” I said, with feverish denial. “She seldom sleeps, I think; and now that the marble is gone, her life seems gone away with it. That is all; that is all.”

  “All!” he echoed, and walked on in silence.

  We came upon the moonlit quietness of Tiber.

  “Do they indeed call her so great in Paris?” I cried, as I looked up at my own window where she had used to stand among the bean-flowers to watch the river on just such a night as this one was.

  “Yes, they have crowned her there; and they say, ‘A great genius? — Yes: she was one of the loves of Hilarion. That is what they say, almost always.”

  “Oh, Christ! and yet we let him live!”

  “She wishes it. Have we a right to make her more desolate?”

  I did not answer him. I was sick of heart. The beautiful Immortal who had come to her in her loneliness was the nobility of Art: must the bow of slander be bent, and the arrow of scorn be sped to slay her, as the shaft of Artemis slew Ariadne?

  Mine had been only a dream, — only a dream: must she always suffer for that?

  Maryx had paused, and was standing on the brink of the water, looking down into its limpid darkness. The moonlight fell on the white locks that had come about his forehead, and the lines of age that these few years had scored upon his cheeks. He was lost in thought.

  “There is one hope for her,” he said to himself; then said aloud to me, —

  “With the morning I shall return to Paris.”

  Then he went across the Tiber to his home upon the hill of Janus.

  He went into one room and locked himself in: it was the room where she had labored, and where there stood the Apollo Citharœdus.

  Who can tell how he prayed there and wrestled in prayer, and to what gods?

  Be his god what it would, he came out thence with every nerve in him strung to a sacrifice as great as ever sent men here in Rome to martyrdom. With the gray dawn, whilst the city he loved was still wrapped in her mantle of mist, he left the lovely house that lie had built for himself under the cypresses and among the myrtles, and left Rome.

  CHAPTER XXXIX.

  IT was the night of the second day when he reached Paris. He went straight to the house of Hilarion.

  It was seven in the evening. He was well known there, and entered without question or hindrance.

  They had been friends for a score of years. The household showed him without hesitation into the presence of their master, who was alone, in his own chamber, with all the graceful litter of a luxurious and curious taste strewn round him, and the smell of flowers, for which he had a feminine fondness, was upon the air, and their blossoms were glowing against the old armor, and the old sculptures, and the dark, book-lined walls of the place.

  Hilarion drew a deeper breath as he saw who had entered, but he had a graceful and gracious greeting always for friend and foe.

  “It is years since we met, my friend,” he said. “ I am glad — —”

  Then he paused; for even to him it was not easy to be false of tongue to Maryx; nor did he mistake the glance that flashed for one instant from the passionate eyes that met his.

  “We can be friends no more,” said Maryx; yet he approached and stood by the hearth.

  “Crispino went to take your life in Venice,” he said, slowly, standing there; “the Greek boy watched for you night and day here; I swore to kill you; and you live still, because she bids us let you live.”

  Hilarion was silent; he felt no resentment. Brave himself, he had no anger against those who would have killed him: he thought them right.

  “You make me think of the Devotio of the Romans,” he said, with a passing smile. “Threatened men live long, they say.”

  Maryx kept down unuttered whatever passion he felt: he had nerved himself to a great unselfish effort, — a last supreme sacrifice, — and was too strong to be easily shaken from his purpose.

  “Listen to me,” he said, calmly still. “We are wrong, and she is right. To kill you would do her no service, and you perhaps no injury: what do we know? I have not come to avenge her: she told me the truth; I have no title to do it. Had she wished it, I would have stayed for that; but, since she chooses to forgive you, it is not for us to make her more desolate than she is.”

  Hilarion interrupted h
im.

  “Have you no title?” said Hilarion, with his coldest smile. “Surely you have one. I think you loved her yourself.”

  “I did: I do.”

  He added nothing more, and there was silence between them.

  Maryx breathed heavily, and his teeth were set hard: he looked away from Hilarion; all the while he had never once looked at him: he was afraid to look at him, lest the great hate that filled his soul should vanquish the resolve on which he had come there.

  “I loved her,” he said, coldly; “I should have given her peace, honor, my name, such as it is, all that one can give: — that is why I have some right to speak to you. Bear with me. I would have killed you as her father, were he living, would have done: let me speak to you as her father could not do. I am no moralist. I will read you no homily. I want but to tell you the truth as I know it. She loves you with so great a love that I think the earth never held one like it. Honest men, and lovers that are faithful, break their hearts in vain for such passion as that; and you! nay, bear with me. You must know very well that what you did was the act of a coward, — since she was defenseless, and had no god but you.”

  Hilarion’s serene eyes lit with sudden fire, but he looked down, and he remained mute.

  “There is no one to tell you all that she has suffered, nor how absolutely she forgives,” said Maryx. “That is why I have come to tell you. It is just to her that you should know.”

  Then he told him all he knew himself: from the time that she had lost her reason, when the clay image had crumbled down under the blows of Amiphion, to the moment, three nights before, when she had said to himself, ere she would touch his hand, “You will not hurt him?”

  It would have cost him less to cut his heart out of his bosom than it cost him to tell the story of that changeless passion; but he told it without flinching, abating no tittle of its truth.

  Hilarion heard him in unbroken silence, leaning against the oaken shelf of his hearth, with his head bent down and his eyelids drooped.